The image that travelled 800,000 kilometers through space
Mars, the Earth and the Moon joined by the magic of an image… The artist-researcher Benjamin Pothier has just taken part in a space art performance from the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands. Tale.
It’s not every day that you get to prepare yourself for a return trip to the Moon, even virtually. This is what I was thinking in the Thalys (high speed train) taking me to The Hague early in the morning. On January 20, 2018, I took part in a space art performance entitled Visual Moonbounce, in collaboration with the artist Daniela de Paulis and a team of radio operators for the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the north of the Netherlands.
But what is this Visual Moonbounce? An incredible project organized by the Italian Daniela de Paulis, artist in residence in this single-dish radio telescope that hosts the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron). The radio telescope had been scrapped in 1998, but the Camras foundation (C.A. Muller Radio Astronomy Station, named after the radio observer having worked at the Dwingeloo radio telescope) put it back into service for educational, artistic and radio-amateur projects.
Daniela de Paulis imagined this artistic application of a former American secret program. “Communication Moon Relay” was a military program from the American navy using the moon bounce technology also called Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) radio communication. It is a technique developed shortly after the Second World War that allows you to send radio signals on the Moon and receive them by bounce in another place on Earth. This project was part of a number of radio-espionage projects developed post-war to follow radio emissions coming from countries of the Eastern bloc and the USSR.
Daniela de Paulis and her team developed a method to send photos through the same process from the radio telescope for a purely artistic and poetic purpose. Daniela invited me to join the project owing to my previous expeditions with astronaut candidates in extreme environments (the Arctic, Himalaya, Atacama desert, etc.) and university articles I published on space exploration and human performance in extreme environments.
A radio telescope in history
The Dwingeloo radio telescope is as much a part of the history of astronomy as it is of the history of artistic expression, since it was the biggest radio telescope in the world until 1956. As for science fiction, certain Star Trek fans might know it was used in 2010 to send an invitation to the Arcturus solar system for the first klingon opera organized on Earth in The Hague!
Our performance took place in the presence of a group of radio amateurs and researchers from SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) very much interested by the perspective of discovering an artistic application of a technology, still very confidential sixty years or so ago…
For this project, I selected a photo taken in the Atacama desert during my participation in the training of candidate astronauts in this Chilean desert, one of the places the most similar to Mars on Earth, where the rover of the Mars Curiosity space probe was tested. So this image of a simulation of Mars really did travel through space on January 20! Having left from a radio telescope in Italy, my photo travelled 400,000 km through space before bouncing on the Moon and coming back to the Dwingeloo radio telescope where it appeared bit by bit, like a fax, on the radio operator Jan’s control screen. The team in fact uses the SSTV (Slow Scan Television) technology, an image transmission technique by radio waves rather similar to the technique used for instance by the astronauts of the Apollo 11 program to send images of the Moon to Earth.
Difficult to explain the sensation provided by the appearance of one of your photos coming back from space and an 800,000km trip! The imperfections and glitches on the image that came back from the Moon add poetry and a touch of nostalgia to the space race of the 1960s. Huge thanks to Daniela de Paulis, Jan and Harry and the Astron and Camras teams for this unforgettable moment.
I am preparing new expeditions and projects linked to space art for 2019. But I will see Daniela de Paulis again as soon as May 2018 for an even more surprising project: Cogito will consist in sending cerebral waves into space… Ad Astra!
More information on Benjamin Pothier and on Daniela de Paulis